


Sugar Coat

by Dragoneisha



Series: Town by the Sea [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Accidental Marriage, Background Relationships, Culture Shock, F/M, Mythical Beings & Creatures, Selkies, Skin Hunger, Touch-Starved, Unreliable Narrator, predation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-27
Updated: 2019-12-02
Packaged: 2020-03-20 03:12:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18984046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dragoneisha/pseuds/Dragoneisha
Summary: To give a selkie her coat is to wed her. Jane dropped hers.





	1. Chapter 1

Coming to visit Roxy is always a treat. She's not only the most trustworthy witchy girl Jane could ask for, which is an immense help when she's found some bespelled treasure under the sea or when she needs a charm to ward off orcas, she's also a delight to talk to and has the _best_ landdweller gossip. Jane doesn't come up enough to learn how everyone is doing, especially as she's got responsibilities in the pod, but she can learn all about Rose and Kanaya and Karkat's secret new beau and whatever else humans get up to. Honestly, what fun.

Plus, she gets to eat cooked food, which is a gift in and of itself. Sure, nothing beats a nice fat penguin, but Jane doesn't live close enough to get those every day, and lobster is really very good with butter.

"So," Jane says, polite enough to push her food to her cheek to talk so Roxy doesn't have to see it, but not polite enough to wait until she's finished eating, "she takes your french onions?"

"Takes them right out of my bag," Roxy confirms, leaning over like she's spilling state secrets. Jane knows. She's coaxed state secrets out of people before. It's part of the fun of being magic is people will tell you anything. "And I'm like, hey, what the fuck -"

"Language." 

"- what the shitting fuck did you just do, girlie, I'll steal your eyes from your face. And so she says, nuh uh, I need these more than you do. Turns out she's right. She's like me too, and she needed something borrowed without asking to get her stuff done, so I'm like, okay."

"You're like, okay," says Jane, between swallows. She doesn't really get how comfortable Roxy is talking such things in public.

The eatery she's been taken to is nice. It serves just the most delicious seafood, save of course what Jane can get in the water, to which it is utterly subpar. (But she won't tell Roxy that.) The fun stuff is what Jane can't usually get, anyway, like this tasty wine sauce on the shrimp and grits she's shoveling into her mouth, or the pain-drink Roxy calls pop which Jane can only drink small sips of. It makes her eyes water, but it's delightfully sweet. She thinks it's called pop because of how it pops in your face when you try to drink it, but she'll have to investigate further to be sure.

Roxy's story really is quite interesting. Jane finds herself leaning forward in her seat as she eats, eyes on her gesticulating tablemate - and not where they need to be. She'll scold herself for it later, but for just a moment, there are no points of contact between her and her shimmering, precious coat.

The patio they sit on is bustling, though the humans are kind enough to keep their voices down. Jane takes a small sip of pop that crackles right in her ears and has herself a giggle at the nearly painful zing. Human life is really quite interesting - she can see how her father wanted so badly to be up here, when he was younger. But the ocean is her home, and she can't imagine for a second having to stay.

It's too loud here, and too dangerous, even when she's spending time with trustworthy humans like Roxy. Roxy barely even counts, anyway - she's a witch, she's safe.

She hears it before she recognizes what it means - the subtlest shift, like a soft little hiss without any of the bite. Jane holds her finger up to Roxy and sits up, on alert. The chair is cool against her back, the deep cut of the dress Roxy lent her baring her skin to the chill wood.

Jane turns, and sees the empty back of a chair. 

She doesn't have to be a genius to figure out what's happened. Someone's taken her coat. Someone has taken her skin off her back and she's so, so completely screwed, there's nothing she can do, her coat is _gone_ and she's let it happen like some daft old fool -

"Hey."

Jane's eyes snap down to where blank, black panes of glass reflect her own frightened expression. She watches in real-time as it melts to confusion instead.

There's a man kneeling by her chair. A human man, with strange hair arranged in spines like a pufferfish and skin that's barely on the cusp of olive. He has a nice nose. Strong. Not easily broken. She can't see his teeth, but his mouth looks just fine to her.

"You dropped this."

She manages to drag her eyes away from his reflective headwear and down to his hand. Strong shoulders on him, too, even if he is on the scrawny side. Well-built. For a human. 

Also, he's holding her skin, so that's nice.

"Oh," she says, and then, after processing what's happening here, "Oh! I - you - my coat!" She reaches to take it, and it slides off this man's long fingers like water, brightening just slightly in the hands of its owner. She gathers her coat to her chest and dips her head in embarrassed thanks. "Thank you, I - I don't know what I'd have done if I lost it."

The man pushes to his feet, rocking back just a little. Jane isn't familiar with how humans carry themselves, but this man has all the stature of a bull who's interested in keeping his own turf. Impassive and dangerous.

He's really, really cool.

"No problem," he says, hooking his thumbs through the useless little straps humans put on their pants. "Can't have some sticky-fingered little vagrant coming and blowing his nose on such an expensive windbreaker."

Oh gracious. Do humans do that? "Oh, goodness no," Jane agrees, and the man offers her a strange jerk of his head upward before he turns to saunter off. Jane watches him go, coat held to her chest, and hopes her stare isn't concentrated enough to disturb him. Like most prey animals, humans tend to be able to tell when they're being watched.

She can't take her eyes off him, though. Something is wiggling about at the back of her mind, just out of reach. Something important...

"Hellooo? Earth to Jane?"

Jane blinks, and turns suddenly to Roxy, who looks quite amused at the whole ordeal. Jane privately thinks that this is very insensitive of her. Doesn't she know how bad this almost was?

"Janey," Roxy says, "are you ogling or what? Never seen you like that before. Is he your type? Tall dweebs?"

"He's not a dweeb," says Jane, looking down at her coat. It smells like his hands, oil and something unfamiliar. She opens her mouth to get a better scent, and finds a strange citrus tang, like some of the fruit-things Roxy has had her try. "He has quite the look about him."

"That dude was the nerdiest little weeb I've ever seen, _and_ he's the weird shut-in every town has. I can't believe he talks, much less that he gave you your coat back."

Jane's train of thought derails and crashes into the mountainous thing she forgot about in a fiery explosion.

"Fuck," she whispers.

Roxy looks at her like she's started making friends with tuna. "Excuse me," she says, her eyebrows in her hairline. "Did you just swear in public?"

"Fuck my life," whispers Jane, dropping her face into her precious, magical coat. "I didn't even think about it, this is - ohhh, Jane, what have you done? Stupid, stupid, stupid."

"Janeycakes, I'm gonna need to be clued in here." Roxy leans over the table, puts her hand on Jane's shoulder. Jane leans eagerly into the touch. She definitely needs some comfort right now. Jane has just made the most colossal mistake of her entire life, and now, she’s got to handle all of this again, and try to figure out how she’s going to tell the pod, her brother, oh, golly, her _dad_... 

With a deep breath, Jane wrings her hands under her coat and explains. "It's - it's such an old tradition, I didn't even think about it when he gave me my coat, but - gosh. Gosh diddly darn it. My father is going to be so disappointed in me." She looks up at Roxy, meeting those majjyked pink eyes with her own blue ones.

"I've just been wed."


	2. Chapter 2

Dirk Strider doesn't go out much. He's on his roof enough to get the medically recommended amount of sunlight per week, he's active enough to stay exactly as healthy as he pleases, and, to be honest, he leaves the house only to work.

He's a mechanic. He goes out and he fixes things and he goes back in. That's all he needs to do outside of his house, and Dirk's happy with it. The rest of his work is done in-house and shipped off to wherever he pleases. He doesn't need to mess about with interacting with people. He isn't going to say something silly, like it's below him or he doesn't have time for that, even though it is and he doesn't. He just doesn't like talking to people.

And that's fine.

He doesn't make friends (except online ones that pay him for dick pics) and he doesn't deal with anything he doesn't have to. He's a well-oiled machine. No surprises. No spare parts. No wrench in the cogs, not that a full-sized wrench would do much more than clank against any standard set of cogs.

That's why it's such a surprise when he gets a visitor. He doesn't usually get those, especially because it very clearly says No Soliciting on his door.

Dirk doesn't get up and go to the door. If they really want his attention, they'll knock again. He's not in the business of giving people what they want. Unless they feel like paying him, in which case he'll give them whatever. Yes, he's concerned about money. He's only just striking out in this podunk little seaside town, and he sunk a lot of money into building this house pretty much from the ground up. He doesn't want to fuck up, miscommunicate with his own damn self, and Tower of Babel this shit so he falls off the cliff and into the unforgiving ocean below.

Oh yeah, he lives on a cliff. He likes the view.

There's an error with his surveillance camera. It's what Dirk's working on right now, so he can't just check and see whoever it is wasting his time outside. He's pretty sure it was some neighborhood kids throwing rocks or something. Kids do that, so he hears. He never really did that. He just got bullied until he got big enough to kick the shit out of everyone who ever tried to fuck with him, and he tried skateboarding for a while, but mostly he just sucked dick behind the skate park.

"Neighborhood kids" is a pretty weird way to put it, though, when he's a solid mile from anything and doesn't have a neighborhood. But hey, why not? It channels the perfect mix of naïve innocence and teenage delinquency to communicate the kind of shit he has to deal with lately. 

Dirk wets his lips and tries to unstick this fucking adhesive. He must have been genuinely off his rocker when he attempted this build. He must have been so completely goddamn stupid he sold all his brains to the highest bidder. Just scooped out all his grey matter and tossed it in the garbage. Made a huge, drippy mess for the poor motherfucker who takes out his garbage. The guy picks it up and it drips every-which-where, smells terrible because it's been rotting in the Goddamned sun this whole week, and gives him an immediate trauma relating to garbage. His lucrative, but dangerous, career is ruined. He hires a therapist that he pays exact four hundred and twenty dollars per session. They make weed jokes but it isn't enough and he takes his life three years later because Dirk was dumb enough to use an adhesive that was going to melt and get brittle when exposed to heat fucking _outside_.

The adhesive - it's not technically glue, it comes out in strips, don't call it glue - keeps breaking, so Dirk has to try and winch the piece up to get under it. It isn't easy, especially because he has to get this part removed without it breaking so he can get a look at the rest of the hardware. He's still not at all sure what the problem is, but it'll be damage to the inner workings, judging by the dents on the outside casing. 

From first glance, he was pretty sure the entire central system is going to be shot. Now, he knows it is, and also, the wiring has gotten itself all twisted from the sea winds. 

It's a blessing in disguise, really. He should have sealed the inside of this thing to protect it from all the salt. Next time, the casing will be made of a better material. Maybe just plastic, but tough plastic. He can 3D print something and use filler to seal the holes, he still has some leftover filler from patching the walls up after all his shit fell over and busted holes in everything because he fell asleep and knocked over his tables and everything on them.

Yep. Blessing in disguise.

Or just hellish incompetence, but the difference between that is an outlook, says one of his online "friends". (They don't talk much because the man is insufferable.)

However, Dirk is never allowed rest, as the bags under his eyes can attest, but what gets the best of him this time is a thrum in his chest. Rather, the buzzer of outside-life-sounds from the headphones he took off, thrumming gently just under his collarbone. It's his visitor.

Dirk knows himself pretty well, he would say. He doesn't think that this little absent reverie was more than a few minutes, but as any door-to-door salesman can attest, a few minutes is an eon standing at a door, especially in this day and age. Whoever it is is either very stubborn or very necessary.

With a low sigh, Dirk unloops the headphones from around his neck, pauses the Sick Beats(TM) that were playing in the background at a level that he couldn't even recognize them anymore, and heads for the door. Whoever this is had better be important. It had better be someone with a lot of time to get chewed out and a lot of God Damned Money to pay him for whatever stupid bullshit they want him to do this time. It had better be the Queen of Sheba with her fucking titties out. That's who it'd better be.

Passing the kitchen, he realizes he's left some shit out for what might be approaching a week now. Dirk is a man who's been accused of fucking Mr. Clean on the side and taking up His holy, germ-free mantle, but he does this fun thing called hyperfixation where he forgets being alive exists in favor of literally anything else (but only one thing) for truly embarrassing periods of time. So this... isn't uncommon, in the one-man Strider household. Doesn't mean it isn't absolutely fuck-nasty, though.

Dirk makes his unwelcome visitor wait a few moments longer while he tosses all that shit straight in the garbage to torment that poor trash man along with his jellied brains, and then the plate, for good measure. He really wants to bleach everything. He's not a man to leave things unfinished -

Holy shit who knocks three full times.

Who on Earth knocks more than once, even. Knocking once is plenty. If they don't answer, they aren't home or they're avoiding you. It's literally just that simple.

Whatever rat bastard Dirk has attracted has done this fun thing called ignore all socially accepted boundaries, and that's Dirk's job, damn it. He pushes a hand through his hair, bites back an unmanly moan of annoyance, and finally, finally goes for the door.

"I am fucking coming," he says, grabbing the handle and yanking it open like he's the head guard who's yanking the dick off of whoever they're drawing and quartering this week. "I swear to God, I'm coming _so goddamn fast_ my refractory period is already over. Does this please you, dude," that is not a dude.

Dirk blinks.

That is not only not a dude, it's the prettiest woman Dirk has ever seen, and, in fact, the same one he saw just a day ago (31 hours exactly, his brain supplies, even though he didn't need that information.) She has the coat that had slid off the back of her chair around her arms and arms only, the part that would go over her shoulders hanging down behind her, like she really _is_ the Queen of Sheba. No smugness about it, though. She just looks up with those blue eyes that had been so scared before and smiles.

Damn, what is it about big teeth and sweet eyes that just gets to a guy? Dirk's fingers dig in a little to the doorframe. He remembers he's supposed to be mad. 

Fuck being mad, now he wants to know what a lady in what has to be a mink coat wants with the mechanic that was fixing the fucking air conditioning at a restaurant he couldn't afford to go to if he sucked the chef's greasy cock.

"Uh," says Dirk, suddenly aware that she definitely said something he definitely did not hear.

"Uh?" parrots the mystery woman, tilting her head to the side. He'd call it cocking it if it wasn't such an exaggerated motion, her ear nearly touching her shoulder. "I know I've bothered you, but -"

"Yeah, you did," Dirk says, because he's an idiot. "I - I didn't hear you."

Why can he talk so eloquently in text and clam up the minute he meets a person like a virgin sphincter. Why is he like this. Hell is real and Satan has him in his lap like he swapped two letters. (He knows why: it's because if he was still talking he would be saying all this bull shit.)  
"I said," says this apparition of status, "that we should be wed by your customs as well."

She offers the thing Dirk was too busy ogling her to notice, and Dirk notes three things at once.

One, she keeps glancing behind her like someone is watching them.

Two, she says "wed" like some Victorian moron with so many neck-frills they'll suffocate.

Three, she's holding out a ring to him, head bowed, submissive posture that doesn't suit her, his subconscious screams, she should be standing tall, because it knows something he doesn't.  
It doesn't take much more time to put together the clues. Call him Sherlock Holmes, but it's really more of a Hercock Bones, because he's being punk'd. He wishes Ashton Kutcher would jump out and shout he was on a game show. That would be better than this, probably.

Clearly, she's been put up to this, and whoever did is waiting (poorly hidden) behind the third tree down the winding road up to his house. Something about it is disappointing. Dirk was kind of hoping for this to get interesting.

Well, he guesses this is kind of interesting.

"Sure, babealicious," he says, his voice adopting that lovely customer-service monotone every customer he's ever served hates. "Shall it be a Christian wedding? Will we consummate in your daddy's car and get handprints all over the windows, steamily spunking all over the place?" He leans in, using his height against her. "How many kids should we have? Two, two and a half? Fuck it, let's make it three and chop the baby's legs off so we aren't a statistical anomaly."

The woman retreats - recoils, he corrects himself. He doesn't let her go, leaning forward to pluck the ring from her fingers.

It's a pretty thing. Dirk doesn't wear rings - he doesn't want a nasty degloving incident considering all the heavy machinery he works with, and besides, they're gaudy. But he can appreciate the aesthetic of what appears to be bronze and copper inlaid around some shiny fuckin' gem he gives absolutely no shits about.

Thing looks kind of like waves.

He tries it on, but surprise surprise, it doesn't fit his finger. It's like she doesn't even know about finger measurements.

"Goddamn. And here I thought you loved me. You don't even know my ring size? Fuck it. Our marriage is off." He takes off the ring, and, with a flick of his thumb, sends it flying. It clinks on the cliff stone and bounces away. He doesn't track it - he doesn't care. This lady can afford another one.

"I'm," says the woman, blinking quickly, like she doesn't know what to say.

Dirk gets that a lot.

"Yeah, whatever. Go fuck yourself, dude." Dirk draws back and slams the door right in her stupid, pretty face.

Serves her right.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> uh, it stalled lol

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for hopping in to check out Sugar Coat! its a story very dear to my heart. you can thank someone i once loved for it existing. 
> 
> ive got a nice 4 chapter buffer so lets hope it doesnt stall


End file.
